Fixes and Tweaks

The Middlebury Institute site now has the same charting capabilities as our other Drupal 8 sites, adding access to multi-faceted bar charts. Additionally, we have fixed an issue that was preventing the donut chart type from rendering.

Information Technology Services (ITS) offers a monthly workshop with recent hires in mind called “ITS & You: Technology Services Overview.” The next session will be held Wednesday, December 11 at 9:00 a.m. We’ll introduce services and resources provided by ITS to all Middlebury employees, including: online learning, file storage, self-service software installation, access to computing help, and more. The workshop format will be a presentation with questions entertained along the way, followed by an optional half hour for hands-on assistance with specific questions.

To sign up, please use our online form. Although geared toward new or recent hires, everyone is welcome to attend – you might surprise yourself with an “aha” moment or two.

Next month’s session will be held on Wednesday, January 15, 2020, at 1:30 pm. Our complete workshop schedule can be viewed at http://go/techworkshops/.

We are pleased to announce the Course Hub update was completed last week. When you next visit courses.middlebury.edu you will see the new interface. For the Institute when you visit courses.miis.edu you will be directed to the new hub at courses.middlebury.edu, please update your bookmarks accordingly. This image shows the new Course Hub interface.

If you have questions or comments about the Course Hub, or you would like to report an issue, please submit a Helpdesk ticket.

The Course Hub’s new look and feel is both mobile-friendly and more accessible. The general user experience and options are largely similar to what users have come to expect in the old Course Hub with small tweaks here and there.

The underlying data-processing engine that runs the Course Hub has been rebuilt from the ground up to streamline how it how it handles user data. The old Hub required several stages of bulk-processing of all class-groups to occur so that it could determine enrollment changes and pass these off to resources like Canvas. Having several stages where every enrollment had to be processed would take between 2-15 hours for new enrollments to cascade through the system. In contrast, the new Course Hub looks at enrollment changes incrementally as they come in and can push new student-enrollments downstream to Canvas and other Resources minutes after they are recorded in Banner.

Fixes and Tweaks

The old method of scheduling news stories to appear in Drupal 8 conflicted with the draft / published / archived content moderation workflow. We have improved this with a new scheduling system that will publish drafts at a prescribed time.

An issue that prevented saving Google Calendar content and sometimes prevented the calendar from appearing on our Drupal 7 sites was fixed.

The update of the admin_views Drupal module mentioned above allowed us to restore a custom report to the Non-College Housing site’s administration interface.

Middlebury Libraries is happy to unveil our newest video tutorial for 2019: Citation For People Who Hate Citation. This is a big-picture look at citation: why we do it, what it’s for, and how to make it an easier, stress-free process. Big thanks to Middlebury students Emma Román ’22 and Kayla Moore ’22 for their participation! You can watch the video here, or find it at go/CitationForPeople/.

This update also includes an admin email verification feature. Every six months, when you log into a WordPress site where you have Administrator privileges, you’ll be asked to verify the central contact email for your site. This is a helpful and important feature that will help us understand which sites are being actively maintained and who to contact should we need to change one of the features that site uses. More information about admin email verification is available here.

Fixes and Tweaks

The Big Number chart component in Drupal 8 now supports decimal places and the percent bar chart type will show the numeric percents next to the category labels.

The 25th Reunion site for the class of 1990 was using a third-party theme which is no longer supported due to an undisclosed security issue. We have remove the site.

A feature of the administration interface for the Non-College Housing site is no longer supported due to an undisclosed security issue. We have remove the code that provided this feature and notified the site admin of a workaround.

There is a new “blogger” role on the Library website for people who just need access to post news and blog items.

I participated in DLINQ’s Crypto Party for Activists and Allies and learned a lot about Tor. Of course I’d heard of Tor beforehand, but I didn’t know how it worked and I only associated it with criminal activity and spy stuff. Turns out it is also an important resource for reporters needing to communicate privately with sources and for activists who also need privacy and may need to thwart a home country’s censorship of the internet. I prepared for the session I was part of by reading about Tor from the resources about web browsers we were given. After the Crypto party, some things were still a little, well, cryptic for me, so I wanted to learn even more. There’s an hour long course on Linked In’s Lynda.com that is very clear and explained Tor and encryption in more detail. The instructor is really good and explained it in plain English (with graphics) for the non-specialist. Here’s the link for the Lynda course Learning Tor and the Dark Web(you’ll need to login with your Midd credentials – we are subscribers).

If you want to know about the other topics from the Crypto party and see all of the resources that were provided, visit the Crypto Party page.